I have escaped from the cardiac care unit after six days. Hurray! To be fair to the QEQM hospital in Margate, they give patients individual freeview televisions with built in DVD players, rather than the ridiculous Patientline rip off, and they don’t pretend mobile phones interfere with medical equipment (or bring down low flying aircraft, which they would were the entirely fake airline warnings true). I was able to patch my laptop through by using my phone as a hotspot, though unfortunately the phone data signal was weak to vanishing.

But one thing the experience did bring home to me was a problem with the portability of my music collection. I had downloaded my CDs on to my laptop and even purchased some music online. But I would like to put the collection in a still more portable format. The difficulty is I have over 14,000 tracks comprising some 1200 hours, currently in a windows media format.

I want an MP3 player but they don’t seem to have that much storage. I want a portable music player, as small and simple as possible, not something that phones, plays videos, connects to the internet or offers nutritional advice. I have great difficulty finding what I need as on close reading it appears that most devices don’t have a very high proportion of advertised memory actually available for music storage.

Any advice? I am constantly amazed that at least one well informed person on absolutely any subject you will name reads this blog. I don’t apologise for the lack of a proper post of commentary today – I am meant to be resting!!

108 thoughts on “Keeping up with Music Media”

You have a choice. Either go for a large hard-disk based player i.e. iPod classic or equivalent. This will set you back about £200. The advanatge is that you can stick all your music on it and then you don’t have to worry about it. They also generally have a nice interface.
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A good alternative is to buy a cheaper player which supports micro SD cards. This would probably cost around £30. You could split your music collection onto two or three SD cards. Advantage is it’s cheaper, and also when the player dies, you just put the cards in a different player. Disadvantage is that you have two or three cards to keep with the player, and also the screens and interfaces tend to be crappy.

The mobile phone thing isn’t really a “thing”? I mean, I never turned my phone off when walking into a hospital anyway, but you’re telling me its all rubbish? *And* on planes? A fearful flight attendant once made me turn my digital camera off in case it interfered with the aircraft =/ I couldn’t afford to miss my flight, or I might have argued..

I somewhat regret how I spoke last night. Mostly because my point was lost. I absolutely stand by argument but wish I had used fewer, better words. I forgot to never go online when angry at the real world and an afternoon of whiskey’s worse for wear. Life is short and messy.

You have nothing to be sorry about Phil, your cutting the Kings throne to size was all in good nature and well argued.

The celebrity shite we are being subjected to is just that, regardless of whether its the music industry, charity or film. We are even led to believe that these people are role models, have something we all should strive for, not just pretty advertising posters, all because they are driving consumerism.

Hmm, whatever the politicians are peddling must be really good stuff cause this celeb formula does not apply to them at all, they can be unpopular as much as we like, still they get promoted as if they were popular.

Phil, don’t be too hard on yourself. I’m not sure your point was lost. As for the words used, you were clearly instigated, and yes you will know better the next time. The afternoon whiskey doesn’t sound good though, if i may say so. Yes life is a messy business–human consciousness is a very messy consciousness. But alcohol, i’m afraid is no escape. Their is no backdoor to heaven. We need to recognise this mess for what it is. And sometimes it is better to just observe the ignorance than engage with it.

Mobile phone & Spotify Premium account. You can stream it or download it to the phone. Anything so esoteric they don’t have you stick on the phone and it plays through the interface. Time to convert all those WMA files to MP3 though Craig. That really is a dying format.

So 14,000 songs at say an average of 3 minutes each is 700 hours or 29 days of listening to all of them non-stop. Odds are some songs you don’t like too much and would skip over. Less is more here, be selective. Chances are with so many songs to chose from you will be spoilt for choice.

DomesticExtremist, 9 Jan, 10:58 am; your advice is good, but you missed out Steps One and Two: “Install a free and open-source operating system, and ensure that the appropriate repository for the ffmpeg package is enabled”. It’s Step One I’m worried about, as some other operating system is probably in the way, occupying the entire hard disk and all mingled up with Craig’s own files.

Correction regarding my advice on microSD cards, dont buy class 10 for phones, they only work well for certain kinds of recording. Class 4 or 6 are best for phones, and performance varies so check benchmarks if bargain hunting.